


the center of the world

by arbitrarily



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: 1960s, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:47:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27526357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Beth Harmon comes home, but first she goes to Los Angeles.
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Comments: 17
Kudos: 225





	the center of the world

**Author's Note:**

> For [alltheseghosttowns](https://alltheseghosttowns.tumblr.com/) and your prompt! ENJOY, and Happy Holidays!

She had one drink on the flight home from Moscow. A Gibson. She told herself this was a compromise, even if she had yet to fully understand how those worked. Compromise, to her, was still just another word for defeat.

She took a sip and savored it. Mother was right: the onion really was better than the olive.

Beth kept her trophies at home in Kentucky. She was in New York now. She rented a hotel room, at the Plaza, pleased with every single thing about it from the tea service to the almost nauseating stench of gardenia that permeated the entire building. She liked Central Park. "You like playing tourist," Benny had told her, like that was the worst insult he could come up with. She hadn’t seen him, not yet, but she talked to him by phone regularly. She sat in her suite in her satin pajamas, her body bent, knees drawn to her chest, and they would talk until the late hours of the night, the early hours of the morning. Until she felt tired enough to sleep.

"This is expensive," that was another thing Benny said to her. "We’re in the same goddamn city."

She had been the one to call him first. She said to him, quickly, “Talk to me. Please. It’s Beth,” and he had laughed.

"I know exactly who you are," he said.

“Did you get the check?”

Jolene chuckled. “Girl, you best believe I got that check. You didn’t have to go including interest.”

“It was only fair.”

Jolene laughed harder. “Listen to that. You and me ain’t known nothing about fairness, not in this life.”

“Maybe we can now.”

“Well. Look who went and found a silver lining.” Jolene made a sound somewhat like a sigh. “Where are you, anyhow? I know it’s not in my neck of the woods.”

“No. It’s not. I guess I'm just trying to decide where I want to go next.”

Beth forgot to think about what life might look like on the other side of Moscow.

She went to the White House after all. She became rather famous; chess became rather popular. They even managed to slap together a movie quickly, starring Ann-Margaret herself. A musical, a redheaded chess prodigy named Betsy Harden who sang nonsensical songs about plays that would never work and danced on a chessboard that lit beneath her feet as she defeated the Soviets and fell in love. It was humiliating.

“They never would’ve done Borgov like that,” she told Benny over the phone.

“Hmm. He probably doesn’t have the legs for it anyhow.”

“I’m going to sell the house. Mother’s house. I mean, I think I’m going to sell the house.”

“Not a bad play,” Benny said. “You’re never fucking in it.”

She still had Mother’s robe. She still wore it some nights. What she didn’t tell Benny was she couldn’t bring herself to return to that house. There was a loneliness to be found, of course, living in hotel rooms, traveling from one city to the next, but there was a worse loneliness to be found waiting for her in Kentucky.

“When am I going to see you?” he said, but she ignored him.

“Yeah. I think I’ll sell the house.”

“I’m going to Los Angeles,” she told Benny. It was autumn and the leaves had yet to change. She was hunched over at the pay phone in the hotel lobby. Not the Plaza, a different hotel, still near Central Park. The Federation had been after her for months to engage in what they called her promotional duties, and Beth had finally caved. 

“Okay.” There was a pause, a scratch of noise on his end. She tried to picture him, restless, assessing what he thought might be her next move. Benny always came so easily to mind for her, it was a surprise when she had to work to conjure him. “Is this your way of asking me to go, too?”

Beth didn’t like that. It felt like she had telegraphed her entire field of play, her plan for attack, and now Benny knew how to win. She wound the telephone cord around her finger. “I never ask you for anything, Benny.” It was her turn to pause. “I’ll be at the Roosevelt.”

She hung up.

The first thing Beth did in Los Angeles was meet an agent at La Scala, per the Federation’s urging. They had never seen such an influx of cash since Beth’s rise not only to the top of the international heap but through American media. They saw more dollar signs for the taking.

She drank black coffee that was too hot for the weather, wanting nothing more than something cold, with ice. And vodka. The agent talked to her about picture deals and life rights, publicity and head shots. He was interrupted by a murmur of excitement that passed from table to table when Jane Fonda walked in.

The agent leaned forward. “That could be you, you know, babe.”

He kept talking, leaning back leisurely in his seat. He was wearing a checkered tie. Her gaze settled there and she played out three different games on his tie alone before he finally, uncomfortably, cleared his throat.

“Hey, uh, babe, are you listening to me?”

“Of course I’m not,” Beth said.

The same thing happened at the Miramar and the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she moved from the Roosevelt to stay out in a bungalow. Nothing anyone had to tell her interested her. She put on Alma’s robe and she sat alone and replayed old games on the chess set she bought all the way back in Lexington with her first winnings. As the night carried on, she barely heard as a visiting rock band destroyed the bungalow beside her own.

When Benny arrived, the Santa Ana winds had kicked up. A girl at an industry party, which Beth attended out of a mixture of compliance, boredom, or inertia, kept saying that the winds were all ionic—chemical, threatening their very compositions. This did not seem to concern her, but rather excite her. Beth felt a brief kinship with the girl, that lure of self-destruction finding a hook, but then the girl kept talking. About auras and the DNC and CIA-based conspiracy theories, mind control, specifically. Beth decided she hated her.

The people at this party were Benny’s kind of people. Beth decided that, too. Beth caught herself thinking of that park in Moscow and felt a well-plucked thread of loneliness worm its way deeper inside herself. She pushed it away, and the girl alike.

Two mornings later, Benny was waiting for her in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Disheveled and grumpy and stupidly, breathtakingly, familiar. He must have taken the red eye out. It was the first time she had seen him since she left for Paris.

“My god, you get around. You might’ve told me you moved hotels and saved me the scavenger hunt.”

“Hi, Benny. How’d you find me?”

Benny lifted his eyebrows and made that incredulous face he too-often pulled with her. “The Federation’s paying your way, Harmon.”

Just as Beth might have suspected, Benny fit in LA. He looked grungy and dirty, lounging there in the lobby with his scuffed duffle bag and his equally scuffed boots. Passing guests eyed him as if they suspected him of being something more interesting than himself. Than chess. A rock star, maybe. He loved it. She could tell: the self-satisfied half-smile that tried his mouth, the way he held and carried himself.

For the first time, she wondered if she did something similar.

Beth hated Los Angeles. She told Benny that, late one morning by the pool. He went from ghastly pale to a barbecued pink in under an hour. They ate avocados and pineapple and oranges and played a lazy—for them—game of chess without the board.

When she said that, he snorted. The bridge of his nose was wet with sweat, his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses. His mouth twisted, ugly, in a way that typically inspired her to want to use her teeth on him.

“Yeah?” he finally said. “‘cause they fucking love you.”

She should have known better—there was always that bit of resentment with Benny. Like a paper cut, brief and painful.

That night, Beth found herself alone with a producer at the Whisky a Go Go. She felt Benny’s eyes on her all night, least of all when she approached the bar. She approached him, after her intolerance reached its limit, and hissed in his ear.

“Seltzer,” she said.

“Good girl,” he said, with matching mocking rancor.

But the producer. He told her that she was pretty enough to be doing more than she already was.

“I’m world champion,” she said, her voice steady with more patience than she felt. "I beat Borgov.”

“Christ, chicky, you coulda beat the ghost of Joseph Stalin himself—doesn’t add up to a hill of beans out here. But that face of yours? Those legs? You could be a star.”

“What do you see when you look at me?” That was what she asked Benny, after they left the Whisky and after they made their way back to the bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Benny had ordered room service and he sat with her, mostly naked, in her unmade bed eating a cheeseburger.

“Like, right now? Or generally? Because I think you’d slap me if I told you what I see right now.” Beth was just as naked as Benny and she rolled her eyes. He took a big bite of his burger.

She didn’t answer him. He was the wrong audience for the question. When he looked at her, he saw less girl and more competitor. Rival. Conqueror. She rolled over onto her stomach. She reached and without a word he gave her his burger.

“This is a dirty city,” she told Benny, her mouth full.

They returned to New York in time for Christmas. Snow fell gray instead of white, collected in heaps and muddied the streets as quickly as it came down. The chill was good, and Beth bundled her scarf around her throat. It was a dirty city, too, but it was one she felt she nearly understood.

She followed Benny, tromped down the stairs to his place.

“You should move,” she told him.

“Alright, Daddy Warbucks,” he called from the bedroom.

It was much as she had left it. She stepped over to his table, where the usual litter of magazines with his face looked back up at her. She moved one to the side, thinking she had spotted something equally familiar. She had; her own face, in black-and-white print, again and again and again. Mixed in, with everything he had saved of himself. She thought of him, thinking of her, and then she had to stop.

When she turned around, he was watching her. He looked both very young and very skittish, much as he had the first night she had slept with him.

“I’m only staying here tonight,” Beth said. She had learned Benny as a person, a man, as well as she had learned how he played. She recognized the clenching of his jaw, the slight narrowing of his eyes. The tension that held his spine, his body tight and ready to fight. “Tomorrow you’ll come with me. We’ll find somewhere more…appropriate.”

His hands bracketed his hips. “Am I to be your pet now, is that it? You’ll put me in your handbag and carry me around?”

“If you’ll fit.”

Benny stepped to her, their toes nearly touching. “Maybe I like it here. It’s mine, after all.”

“You like me better.” She didn’t say the rest of it— _I’m yours, in my way, and you’re mine, too_ —because she had yet to learn how to open herself to anyone other than Jolene. He must have learned to read her near as well as she could read him. Her face must have done something because his own softened. It wasn’t in defeat—she knew very well what that looked like on him—and it was’t victory. It was something beyond the game, and it was so funny. Beth never thought anything could matter beyond that square and all the squares contained within it.

“You never told me, before. How you learned to play.”

“You never asked.”

Benny didn’t say anything. They had always played games like this, sidestepping what could be said plain and honest to each other. A defensive maneuver. When you opened the board to people like themselves you stood to lose. But then, without an opening, you could not win. You couldn’t even play.

“You can read about it in _TIME_ magazine,” she said now, deflecting.

“I have.” He sighed. In the low light, the chain around his neck glinted. “I think I’d like to hear it from you.”

Beth stared up at the ceiling and saw nothing. No game. “Alright,” she said. "His name was Mr. Shaibel and he was a janitor. I went down to the basement, to clap erasers, and he was there. He was playing or he was studying, and I was young and I liked the look of the board,” she started. Benny laid back and he listened.


End file.
